follows is the one between Romance and Realism. The word “romance”
is used in a sort of ecstasy by too many conventional people; the
word “realism” is by such critics applied to one particular technical
method. It has seemed better for the immediate purpose to restrict the
word “romance” to a purely technical meaning, since Romance, to have
any value whatever, must form a part of our conception of reality. It
is the divorce of Romance from Reality which has led to its decay; it
is not that Romance has been cruelly done to death by Realism. Romance
since Stevenson has become sentimental and unbelievable. That is why
Romance has no friends, but only advocates. The word “romance,” then,
is in this chapter used to describe a fiction the chief interest in
which is supported by varied incidents of an uncommon or obsolete
nature. The word “novel” is applied to a fiction in which the chief
interest is less that of incident and more the interest awakened
by character and by a gradual relation of happenings probable in
themselves and growing naturally out of the interplay of character.
The word “realism” is used in relation to the critical interpretation
of actual things. It must not be regarded as describing here an
accumulation of detail or a preference for unpleasant subjects. For
that use of the word one may refer to our leading critical journals
_passim_. The accumulation of detail belongs to a technical method,
and should be treated on its merits as part of a technical method.
Realism, as the word is here used, is applied only to work in which the
author’s invention and imagination have been strictly disciplined by
experience and judgment, and in which his direct aim has been precision
rather than the attainment of broad effects. It is used consciously as
a word of neither praise nor blame; though it is possible that I may
exaggerate the merits of clear perception above some other qualities
which I appreciate less.
II
Therefore, when I say that Stevenson progressed as a novelist and as
a tale-teller from romance to realism I hope to be absolved of any
wish to suit facts to a theory. The fact that he so progressed simply
is there, and that should be sufficient. He progressed from _Treasure
Island_, which he wrote when he was a little over thirty, to _Weir of
Hermiston_, upon which he was engaged at the time of his death at the
age of forty-four. There can be no question of his advance in power.
_Treasure Island_ is an excellent adventure-story; _Weir of Hermiston_
seemed to have the makings of a considerable novel, incomparably
superior to any other novel or romance ever written by Stevenson.
Between the two books lie a host of experiments, from _Prince Otto_
to the rather perfunctory _St. Ives_, through _Kidnapped_ and _The
Master of Ballantrae_, to _The Wrecker_, _Catriona_, and _The Ebb
Tide_. One finds in _The Master of Ballantrae_ the highest point of
the romantic novels, not because as a whole it is a great book, but
because it has very distinguished scenes; and thereafter follows a
perceptible decline in raciness. Stevenson still had the knack, and
could still make the supporters of his convention look as clumsy as
ghouls, but his zest was impaired. He did now with pains what before
had been the easiest part of his work. “Play in its wide sense, as
the artificial induction of sensation, including all games and all
arts, will, indeed, go far to keep him conscious of himself; but in
the end he wearies for realities,” said Stevenson in _The Day After
To-morrow_. From the inexperience of real life which in 1882 led him,
by means of a map and some literary inspirations, to make up a tale
such as he thought he would himself have liked as a boy, he turned in
later years to work more profound. His romance six years later than
_Treasure Island_ had, besides its adventures and its pawky narration,
a moral theme; ten years later it had no theme at all, but a faint
dragging sweetness due to the reintroduction of two old friends and
the picture of a conventional heroine; at the end of his life he began
three historical romances, none of which was ever finished, and only
one of which ever proceeded beyond its first chapters. It is true that
the pretty, heavily figured style was still at command; there was no
cessation of skill. There never was any cessation of skill. If skill
were needed Stevenson had it ever ready. “I have been found short of
bread, gold or grace,” says St. Ives; “I was never yet found wanting
an answer.” That is a point to note in Stevenson’s equipment, that he
was always very apt with the pen. Having turned writer in his youth,
he remained a writer to the end. He could not dictate a letter but
what the phrases ran in accustomed grooves, half-way to the tropes
of his Covenanting manner. So it was that themes too slight, as in
_Prince Otto_, and themes very complicated (as in _The Wrecker_), came
readily to be embarked upon. He was not sufficiently critical of a
theme, so long as it seemed superficially to offer some scope for his
skill; which accounts for his abandoned fragments--e.g. _Heathercat_,
_The Great North Road_, _Sophia Scarlet_, _The Young Chevalier_--and
for the inequalities in even his best romances. Whatever theme he
chose he could write upon it with such damnable skill that nothing
truly came amiss or really stretched to the full his genuine talent.
The theme, such as it was, lay to hand; there wanted nothing but his
skill and the labour of composition. That, curiously enough, shadows
out the occupation of the literary hack (a sad person who writes
for money and only more money, and whose days are circumscribed by
the need for continuous work in the field of romance); but although
Stevenson claimed to write for money, “a noble deity” (see a humorous
but truthful passage in the letter of January, 1886, to Mr. Gosse),
he claimed also to write for himself, and in this sense he was, to our
relief, and in spite of any misdirected labours, an artist. There is,
of course, much cant written and spoken about writing for money, both
for and against; but the man who has no preference between the themes
upon which he will write for money must be a very professional writer,
and the hack is only a base virtuoso. That is why it is worth putting
upon record that Stevenson, after saying he wrote, not for the public,
but for money, added: “and most of all for myself, not perhaps any
more noble (i.e. than money), but more intelligent and nearer home.”
He wrote variously from diversity of taste: a more interesting and
tantalising question is that of his object.
III
Mr. Henry James, in criticising a selection of our modern novelists,
describes himself as reading their work with, one imagines, continuous
interest, and then, in face of all the phenomena which have
industriously been gathered for his inspection, asking for something
further. Mr. Henry James, apparently, wants to know “why they do it.”
It would not be in place here to say that the modern novelists are
all to some extent followers of Mr. James; but it is very interesting
to put that same question (amounting to a sort of _cui bono?_) to the
romantic novelists. One would like to know what Stevenson aimed at in
his romances. One does not receive from any one of the romances the
thrill given by a perfect work of art. Their interest is broken and
episodic; they fall apart in strange places, and show gaps, and (as in
the case of works by Wilkie Collins and Mr. Conrad) one or two of them,
including _The Master of Ballantrae_, are patched together by means of
contributory “narratives” and “stories” which can never, whatever the
skill of their interposition, preserve any appearance of vital form,
and which, at the best, can be no more than exhibitions of virtuosity.
They retain their continuity of interest only by means of the
narrator’s continuance; and the use of “narrations” itself is a device
throwing into strong relief the incongruities of the tale and its
invented scribe. They offend our sense of form by all sorts of changes
of scene, lapses of time, discursiveness, and those other faults which
are nowadays so much remarked. And, above all, once the last page is
turned, we remember one or two characters and one or two incidents,
and we wonder about the corollary, or whatever it is that Mr. James
wonders about. We have been entertained, excited, amused, sometimes
enthralled. In reading the books again, as we are soon, because of our
forgetfulness, able to do, we recover something of the first pleasure.
But of Stevenson’s aim we can discover no more than we can discover of
the aim of the hack-writer. We feel that his work is better, that it
has greater skill, that it is graceful, apt, distinguished even. We
feel that, of its kind, it is far superior to anything since written.
Was there any aim beyond that of giving pleasure? Need we look for
another? It is true that the problem-novel is discredited, and it is
true that our most commercially successful novelists are those who can
“tell a story.” It is also true that our so-called artistic stories
are like the needy knife-grinder. I propose to return later to this
point, so we will take another one first. “Vital,” says Stevenson,
“vital--that’s what I am, at first: wholly vital, with a buoyancy of
life. Then lyrical, if it may be, and picturesque, always with an epic
value of scenes, so that the figures remain in the mind’s eye for ever.”
We may well grant the picturesqueness; and we may grant a nervous
buoyancy of fluctuating high spirits. Through all the novels there
are passages of extreme beauty, to which we may grant the description
“lyrical”; and many of the famous scenes have value which it is open to
anybody to call epical if they wish to do so. It is the word “vital”
that we find difficult to accept, and the “buoyancy of life.” For
if there is one thing to be inferred from the contrivances and the
slacknesses and the other shortcomings of Stevenson’s romances to
which we shall gradually be able to make reference, it is that they
lack vitality. They have a fine brag of words, and they have fine
scenes and incidents; but where is there any one of them in which the
author can sustain the pitch of imagining that will carry us on the
wings of a vital romance? I am referring at this moment to this one
point only. I am saying nothing about the books as pieces of literary
artifice. There is not one of Stevenson’s own original romances that
is not made in two or three or even a hundred flights. There is not
one that is not pieced together by innumerable inventions, so that
it is a sort of patchwork. That is a persistent defect. It is in
_Treasure Island_, it is in _The Master_, it is in _The Wrecker_ and
it is in _Weir_, patent to the most casual glance. And the cause of
that is low vitality--his own and the book’s. Not one of them, not
even _Treasure Island_, not even _The Master of Ballantrae_, which
falls in two, has any powerful inevitability. These romances are, in
fact, the romances of a sick man of tremendous nervous force, but of
neither physical nor intellectual nor even imaginative energy. One may
see it in the flickering of Alan Breck. Alan Breck is the most famous
of all Stevenson’s characters, with the possible exception of Silver:
does he remain vivid all the time? He does not. He loses vitality
several times in the course of _Kidnapped_; he hardly attains it in
_Catriona_. There is no fault there; there is a weakness. Stevenson’s
romances were based upon a survival of boyish interests; they are full
of fantastic whips and those clever manipulations with which writers
sometimes conceal weaknesses; they have a tremendous vain Scots savour
of language and retort; they have exciting, impressive, and splendidly
vivid scenes. But the quality they have not is the fine careless rich
quality of being vital. If we think, in reading them, that they are
vital, the cause of our deception is Stevenson’s skill. He disarms
us by his extraordinary plausible air of telling a story. We are as
helpless as boys reading _Treasure Island_. But Stevenson is always
telling a story without end; and it is never really a story at all, but
a series of nervous rillets making belief to be a river. There are
ingredients in the story; there is David Balfour starting out from his
old home, and coming to his uncle’s house, and being sent nearly to
his death up the dreadful stair; and there is the kidnapping of David,
and then the arrival on board of the survivor from a run-down boat,
who proves to be Alan; the fight; and the march after Alan; the Appin
murder; and the flight of David and Alan--all magnificently described,
well invented, well imagined, but all as episodes or incidents, not as
a story. Something else, some other things, all sorts of other things,
might just as well have happened as those things which make the story
as we know it. There is no continuous vitality even in _Kidnapped_; and
yet, on that score, it is the best of the romances. It has a greater
“buoyancy” (though not precisely, perhaps, the “buoyancy of life”)
than any of the other historical romances. It does not compare with
_The Master of Ballantrae_ for dignity or even for the distinction of
isolated scenes; but for vitality it is superior.
IV
Why Stevenson should have adopted in so many instances the curious
and unsatisfactory method, involving so much falseness, of the first
person singular, with those man-traps, the things the narrator could
never have known, supplied by leaves from other narratives, it is
hard to understand. Defoe’s method was simple and laborious; but it
was pure narrative, and as far as one recollects, there was none of
this making up by interpolated passages. The person of the narrator
was maintained all the time. So with the picaresque romances. The
narrative, used by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, does indeed offer some
analogy; but never a very happy example of what is at best a broken and
unbelievable stratagem. Stevenson, of course, used it in a marked way
in _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_; and in _Treasure Island_ one cheerfully
accepts the convention (only protesting that the Doctor’s interference
causes a break both irritating and, technically, unscrupulous). With
the exception that the Doctor’s portion is somehow brought in about
the middle of the book, the way the story came to be written is not
allowed to worry us after the first sentence. _Treasure Island_ is
not, therefore, a great offender. _Kidnapped_ starts in a similarly
abrupt way, and this book and _Catriona_ are kept fairly closely to
the convention. But in _The Master of Ballantrae_ and in _The Wrecker_
there are several inter-narratives which, even if in the earlier book
they provide certain keys, do seriously affect the form of the story.
The disadvantage of the narrator is manifest enough. Every step
outside his probable knowledge must be elaborately explained, or he
will become uncomfortably superhuman; he can never be in danger which
deprives him of speech or the power to write, but has often lived to
a green and unromantic old age by the time his marvellous faculty for
remembering things leads him to “take up the pen.” (“They might easily
take it in their heads to give us chase,” says the Chevalier de Burke,
“and had we been overtaken, _I had never written these memoirs_.”) If
he is the hero he risks being a prig or a braggart (in _St. Ives_ he
is, somehow, for all his gentility, not a gentleman); and he often
succeeds in being rather a ninny, albeit a courageous ninny. It is this
fact, possibly, that accounts for Mr. Stanley Weyman’s “gentlemen of
France” and the deplorable “heroes” of many another costume romance
inspired by Stevenson’s examples. If he is the good old retainer,--as
is Mackellar in _The Master_--he must overcome one’s distrust of his
sleek literary craft. These are side issues of the main one--which is
that such narratives are improbable. Their apparent virtue, which in
itself is a snare, lies in the fact that they keep the reader’s eye
focussed upon the narrator, and seem thus to give homogeneity to a
book. They enable the author to refuse detachment and to mingle with
his characters, tapping them upon the arm so that the reader receives
their full glance, or bidding them give some little personal exhibition
for the naturalness of the book. Stevenson saw, perhaps, that such a
method solved some of his difficulties. He loved ease of demeanour. He
could use his Covenanting style at will, with the quaint, shrewd twists
of language which do not fail to strike us impressively as we read; and
he could throw off the task of creating a hero whom we should recognise
as such in spite of all things, as we recognise Don Quixote or Cousin
Pons or Prince Myshkin. Also, the use of the “I” probably made the
tale better fun for himself. It was perhaps part of the make-belief.
It avoided formality; it brought him nearer his canvas; it saved him
the need of focussing the whole picture. That, constructively, was,
as I have suggested earlier in another way, his prime weakness as a
novelist. He could not see a book steadily and see it whole. Partly it
may have been that by putting himself in the frame he made the picture
a panorama--“the reader is hurried from place to place and sea to
sea, and the book is less a romance than a panorama” is Stevenson’s
own admission in the case of _The Wrecker_--but most influentially,
I think, it was that he had really not the physical strength and the
physical energy to grasp a book entire, or to keep his invention and
imagination at any extreme heat for any length of time. Whatever may
be the case of this, however, it seems clear that the first person
singular is a difficult and a tricky method to employ, abounding in
risk of accident, and much inclined to make for improbability, unless
the writer is content absolutely to limit the narrator’s knowledge
to things experienced, with details only filled out from hearsay,
and unless he has superhuman powers of detachment. One is inclined
to suppose that Stevenson for a considerable time fought shy of the
objective male central character after his failure with Prince Otto,
where the use of the first person might, indeed, have been distinctly
amusing as an illuminant. At any rate, fully half of his romantic tales
are personally narrated; and in only one of them, where the narrator is
a real character and only partially a “combatant,” does the power of
detachment powerfully appear.
V
Prince Otto, of course, is only one out of the many self-portraits.
He is, as it were, Stevenson’s Hamlet, which is not quite as good as
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He is nearer to Stevenson than David Balfour,
because David Balfour is an ideal, while Prince Otto is an apology.
All Stevenson’s heroes, in fact, are tinged with the faint complacent
self-depreciation which is capable of being made truly heroic, or
merely weak, or, possessed of that “something that was scarcely pride
or strength, that was perhaps only refinement,” very human. But not
one of these heroes is complete. All, as it were, are misty about the
edges. The vigorous David Balfour falls into the self-distrust, not
of a young man of strength, but of a self-engrossed student; weakness
is paramount in the main character in _The Ebb Tide_; the dandiacal
St. Ives is at the mercy of circumstance, waiting upon the next thing,
reliant only upon Stevenson’s goodwill, horribly unmasculine in his
plans to please. Mackellar is a puritanical coward, but magnificently
suggested; Loudon Dodd, and even young Archie Weir, being both very
moral and, one imagines, very inexperienced in the ways of life,
combine courage with weakness most pitiable. They are all feminine,
brave in desperation, weak in thought. They are all related to Jack
Matcham in _The Black Arrow_. Stevenson admired courage, and he
possessed courage, as women admire and possess courage. He loved a
brave man, and a tale of adventure, as women love these things. He did
not take them for granted, but must hint and nibble at them all the
time, thinking, perhaps, that he was making a portrait, but instead of
that making what represents for us a tortured ideal. “I should have
been a man child,” says Catriona. “In my own thoughts it is so I am
always; and I go on telling myself about this thing that is to befall
and that. Then it comes to the place of the fighting, and it comes over
me that I am only a girl at all events, and cannot hold a sword or give
one good blow; and then I have to twist my story round about, so that
the fighting is to stop, and yet me have the best of it, just like
you and the lieutenant; and I am the boy that makes the fine speeches
all through, like Mr. David Balfour.” That is why _Prince Otto_, long
the test of the true Stevensonian, seems to us now, increasingly,
a lackadaisical gimcrack, as bloodless as a conceit, losing by its
spinning as a tale all the fantastic effect it might have enjoyed as
one of the _New Arabian Nights_. It has a great deal of beauty, and
a good deal of perception both of character and of situation; but the
beauty droops and sickens among the meshes of delicate writing, and the
perception is all upon the surface of life, and, even so, abstract and
without the impulse of human things.
It is the faint humour of Stevenson that makes the book seem sickly. It
is that faint humour which brings so much of his heroic work sliding
sand-like to our feet. For it must be realised that if one is going
to be romantical one must have either no humour at all (which perhaps
is an ideal state) or a strong, transfiguring humour which is capable
of exuberance and monstrosity as well as of satiric depreciation.
Stevenson’s humour was of that almost imperceptible kind which grows in
Scotland, and which has given rise to the legend that Scotsmen “joke
wi’ deeficulty.” It was dry, it was nonsensical, it was satiric; it was
the humour that depends upon tone, a delicacy of emphasis or pause.
It was the humour of a sick man who had high spirits and very little
morbidity. Now in _Prince Otto_ there is morbidity; it is not a healthy
book. It could not have been written by an active and vigorous man; and
I do not think Stevenson could have written it after he went to Samoa.
Its literary forbear, “Harry Richmond,” although a very cumbrous and
mannered work, has a trenchant vigour which keeps alive our admiration
after our interest has dropped. It is elaborate and pompous; but it
has power. _Prince Otto_ owes its best moments to a purely literary
skit on the English traveller among foreign courts: that skit, it is
true, is priceless. Apart from Sir John Crabtree, however, the book
depends entirely for its charm upon its faint, almost swooning, beauty
of style; and it is indeed surprising that the book should have enjoyed
among Stevenson’s male worshippers so much handsome appreciation. It is
so quizzical, where it is not sentimental or “conventional,” that it
is half the time engaged in self-consumption, which is as though one
should say that it is eaten up with vanity.
VI